When a baby starts to cry, new parents have to play a guessing game to figure out why. Hunger? A dirty diaper? Or something more serious, like pain?
Apolline Deroche says some of that guesswork can be eliminated by an app her startup, Cappella, is aiming to launch in November that acts as an AI-powered baby cry translator.
“We’re able to, one, identify there’s a baby crying,” Deroche said. “And two, as soon as the baby starts crying we assign a meaning to the cry. So we can tell whether the baby is tired, hungry, in pain, needs to burp, needs a diaper change, or something else.”
Breaking down the babble
The science behind this technology is rooted in using AI for sound analysis.
Deroche said doctors and nurses, especially NICU nurses, are the best experts available for labeling baby cries, since babies themselves can’t talk. The Cappella team uses big data sets of these labeled cries to train AI to differentiate between the needs behind different baby noises.
“The AI is just doing its own thing to identify the features and the weights of different parameters that it basically picks up,” Deroche said. “But you need to give it data so that it can cluster, these are the tired cries, these are the hungry cries, these are the pain cries.”
The startup’s app also plays soothing sounds or melodies when it hears crying, Deroche said. The app analyzes how the baby responds to different sounds to find the right calming noises for each infant. This isn’t meant to eliminate the need for parents or caregivers to intervene, Deroche said, but rather to bring the baby back to a calmer state and help regulate their emotions.
Deroche is from France and completed a degree in engineering in her home country before coming to the MIT Sloan School of Management. While she was in classes learning about entrepreneurship, she started to brainstorm ways to combine her interests in early childhood development, sound and technology. Cappella was the product of those reflections and now Deroche’s full-time focus.
After graduating from MIT, Deroche took Cappella through the Techstars Atlanta accelerator. She said she remains based in Boston because of her entrepreneurship connections in the area. While Boston isn’t as big in the consumer space, Deroche said, the world is still hybrid and she can still easily take Zoom meetings with investors in the Bay Area as needed.
Preparing for launch
Cappella aims to do more than just get parents to download their app, Deroche said. Her goal is to replace baby monitors.
To use Cappella’s app, parents just need an old cell phone, Deroche said. Parents download their app on two different devices. The old phone is the baby unit which monitors the baby through video and audio and the other device is the parent’s unit. The parents can watch the baby and get notifications when the baby cries.
Deroche said they plan to partner with parenting communities through social media to test and roll out the app. They also will go after influencer partnerships and work with baby registry websites to become included on their lists.
Ahead of the app’s launch in November, Cappella has started a waitlist for those interested in being an early user.
Sign up for The Beat, BostInno’s free daily innovation newsletter from BostInno reporter Hannah Green. See past examples here.
